“How much time would we save if we went through the True Blight?” Lysabel asked as the road east, passing wagons laden with cotton that was destined for the weavers and lace shops for which Barsine was famous. She was not wearing her ring and she bore no sign of her affiliation with the Tower but still people made way for them, fine clothes and fine horses all the pass they needed.

“Maybe it would save us three days, might cost us the rest of our lives,” Markus responded. Lysabel chafed with impatience she couldn’t quite define. She had a sense that this was important, somehow more than just a few trollocs out to raid, but she had no idea why. Such leaps of intuition, without logical back up, would have earned her hard looks from her Sisters but Lysabel was of the opinion that if you trained your mind to be logical, your intuition was likely logic that you hadn’t yet been able to articulate. The dark of the moon, the time the trolloc writing had given for the attack, was still over two weeks away. A week to reach their goal, perhaps three days on horseback to cover what trollocs had managed on foot. Alot depended on whether they would be able to find the gate. She had asked for pigeons to be sent to the border fortresses to warn them to be on their guard, but that was the equivalent of telling a watch dog to be alert. Her fingers drummed her saddle pommel as she thought about it.

“We need to locate the gate within the next seven days,” she told him, “I don’t believe this is a single band of trollocs, and even if it is I want to know what is worth moving in such strength and such secrecy.”